Iranian Cinema Within a Global Context

IRANIAN CINEMA WITHIN A GLOBAL CONTEXT

Kiarostami’s Shirin as a National Mediator of International Cinematic Exchange

by Janan Mostajabi

DO FILMS EVER EXIST EXCLUSIVELY within national boundaries? The response tends to be an easy “no” when we consider films that are created deliberately with an international audience in mind; but is that also the case for films with a primarily national focus? Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) is one such film, as it consists solely of closeups of Iranian women’s faces watching the story of “Khosrow and Shirin”–a mythical Persian tale about a woman’s love and liberation.

Abbas Kiarostami is arguably one of the most prominent figures in Iranian cinema, and one of the pioneers of a major cinematic movement–the Second Iranian New Wave–that emerged after the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979. Film scholars have categorized Kiarostami’s career into four delineated phases–Experiential, Epistemological, Auteurism, and Innovation–each with certain technical and stylistic hallmarks that were shaped by the sociocultural context and the artistic restrictions in Iran at the time. In addition to his national acclaim, Kiarostami is arguably also one of the most internationally-recognized Iranian filmmakers, with prestigious awards from the Cannes and the Venice film festivals under his belt. Interestingly, despite Kiarostami’s international eminence, Shirin, with its markedly different style, has received little recognition outside of Iran.

Shirin is viewed by some film scholars as Kiarostami’s “most paradoxical” work. The film is all the more fascinating especially given its ostensible national focus on the one hand and, on the other hand, the diverse contextual backdrop of the Second Iranian New Wave that the film was a part of. The Second Iranian New Wave movement is often associated with niche art films that typically have sociopolitical and philosophical themes. Cinematically and stylistically, the Second Iranian New Wave was significantly influenced by Italian Neorealism: a contemporaneous cinematic trend that flourished in Italy after WWII in response to the atrocities of fascism. Another cinematic paradigm that inspired the Second Iranian New Wave, specifically its theoretical framework about cinematic representation and visual pleasure, was the classical Hollywood cinema. Given the eclectic cultural background of the Second Iranian New Wave as well as Kiarostami’s global acclaim, is it not ironic that such an innovative film as Shirin has not won formal international recognition? As tempting as it may be to surrender and accept Shirin as a parochial Persian-specific film, once we consider the parallels between the film and Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema, a different image manifests.

It is noteworthy that both Italian Neorealism and the Second Iranian New Wave were, in a way, post-trauma cinematic movements, as the former emerged after WWII and the latter in the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution.

Therefore, both movements emerged in social contexts that significantly impacted women’s role in society. Even though both movements arose in similar transitional periods, their different representation of women is particularly revealing. For example, in Rome, Open City (1945), a quintessential Italian Neorealist work, women are portrayed as inferior to men, therefore unilaterally buttressing and maintaining the post-war Italian patriarchal schema. In contrast, Shirin’s depiction of women is more complex: on the one hand, Shirin’s hyper-emphasis on female faces for the entire duration of the film implicitly destabilizes gendered religious ideologies and yet, the female characters are veiled in accordance with Islamic etiquettes. Therefore, such an equivocal depiction of the female characters creates an ambivalent relation to the predominant religious demands in Iran and makes Shirin at once subversive, as it defies religious prescriptions by foregrounding the women’s feminine facial features, but also compliant, since it presents the women in Islamic clothing.

Furthermore, in classical Hollywood cinema, the female closeup functioned as an adaptive response to the censorship restrictions of the 1930s-1960s in the United States, and Kiarostami’s Shirin adopts a similar approach. The extensive use of closeups of veiled women in Shirin is a strategy to still capture women on the screen while also complying with the Islamic Codes of Modesty, a set of censorship guidelines on the cinematic representation of women that restricted the on-screen depiction of the female body. Nonetheless, Kiarostami has skillfully crafted the shots so that the women’s veils come to serve as a frame-within-a-frame, which further isolates the female face against the dark background and amplifies the closeup effect. In fact, Kiarostami’s extensive use of closeup shots in a film exclusively about women creates an experience of “ethical intimacy” and connection between the audience and the female characters, according to film scholar Asbjørn Grønstad. Therefore, this accentuation of the women through closeup shots serves to situate them at the center of the plot and to convey a sense of feminist empowerment, which has implications for the societal status of Iranian women more broadly.

Shirin showcases Kiarostami’s mastery in unifying foreign influences from Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood and aptly morphing them into a coherent, nation-specific whole. This unveils the cross-cultural dialogue that occurs between different cinemas and the subsequent cultural translation that enables otherwise universal cinematic techniques, such as the closeup, to be molded into a unique social context, such as the sociocultural context of post-Revolutionary Iran. Shirin, a seemingly Persian-centered work, underscores a productive dialectic between national and international film forms and, in effect, at once embodies both cultural specificity and universality.